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March 22, 2013

BYOD isn't going to die. But companies are starting to realize that a laissez-faire approach is not sustainable and that more controls and a better strategy are needed. Today, only 21% of companies in our Enterprise Mobility Study have a mobile strategy in place, leaving the rest with a hodgepodge of procedures that are often costly and inconsistent.

Hong Kong planning underground data centers
While the theory is sound, the environmental impact of construction could be high, as water tables would need to be lowered and toxic material removed, she noted. Engineering consultancy firm Arup released an initial feasibility report last year which stated underground facilities in Hong Kong will benefit datacenter owners by increasing security, as it reduced the risk of accidental impact, blast and acts of terrorism.

Retro Database dBASE Making a Comeback?
The decline started with "the disastrous introduction of dBase IV, whose stability was so poor many users were forced to try other solutions. This was coincident with an industry-wide switch to SQL in the client-server market, and the rapid introduction of Microsoft Windows in the business market." Anyway, the new version includes ADO support, a new UI and "enhanced developer features with support for callbacks and the ability to perform high precision math."

Leadership: Disappointed To The Core
"Disappointment is like taking a long lonely walk down a long corridor, and the door at the very end is bolted." -- Those of us, who have experienced disappointment need to be reminded that in this corridor we have doors to the left and to the right. These are the doors made for our choosing.

Breakthroughs in strategy
The cliff-jumping metaphor is a great one and it makes my response obvious: Because it's more fun and there are relatively few consequences. I am only being a little glib. Having spent 20+ years in strategy execution as an internal and external consultant in several dozen organizations, I have come to believe that there are systemic issues, as in “built into the systems and culture of the organization.”

"Tiny Lab" Implanted Under Skin Transmits Blood Marker Levels
Scientists in Switzerland have developed a "tiny lab" on a chip that when implanted just under the skin can track levels of up to five substances in the blood and transmit the results wirelessly to a smartphone or other receiving device in a "telemedicine" network. They suggest the device could be ready for market in four years and has many potential uses, such as helping doctors monitor patients undergoing chemotherapy.

6 Things We Learned about Enterprise Analytics from Nate Silver
To a packed keynote audience at Gartner’s BI event in Grapevine, Texas, celebrated political prognosticator Nate Silver put his wide analytic expertise on display. Along with touching on the way Bayes and data models can – and can’t – impact natural disaster forecasts and chess mastery, Silver dropped plenty of tidbits about the practical strategy and application of analytics. Here are half-dozen quotes and comments that Silver made during his Gartner keynote that are relevant to the enterprise analytics space.

Industry Watch: Information Governance
“However, simply having a policy in place does not ensure that good information governance occurs,” Miles wrote in the report. “Half of those with a policy admit that it is largely unreferenced and unaudited.” ... Aside from the sometimes difficult work of implementing governance policies, AIIM cited other continuing obstacles, such as the range of privacy laws and legal mechanisms in different countries, and the often missing step of training. Only 16 percent regularly train all staff on governance expectations, and almost double that amount have no stated training at all.

IBM moves toward post-silicon transistor
"The scaling of conventional-based transistors is nearing an end after a fantastic run of 50 years," said Stuart Parkin, an IBM fellow at IBM Research who leads the research. "We need to consider alternative devices and materials that will have to operate entirely differently. There aren't many avenues to follow beyond silicon. One of them is correlated electronic systems."

TeamViewer-based cyberespionage operation targets activists, researchers say
The malware is designed to download and execute other modules from the C2 servers as instructed by the attackers. The additional modules can perform various tasks including recoding keystrokes in various processes and taking screen shots, gathering information about the system and local accounts, grabbing the history of attached devices from iTunes and scanning the local hard disk and remote network shares for specific file types.